The Barn Dance That Built a House

“Nobody’s asking you to dance. Just come eat.”

It was true. It was not the whole truth, and I have asked God about that a few times since. I think He had a sense of humor about it.

Saturday came up clear and brutal. The thermometer on Walt’s porch said eleven below at seven in the morning and four below by noon. I stood at my kitchen window watching the snow blow across the field and thinking, no one is going to come out in this.

By noon the barn was full of work. Dennis and Hank had the heaters going, and it had come up to about forty-five degrees inside, which in February in Iowa feels like July. Alma and her sister laid pies out on trestle tables, every one under a dish towel. The rest of it stood along the walls, and I will come to that.

Then everyone went home to change, and I was alone in there at four-thirty.

I stood in the center aisle with my coat on and counted the heaters again. There were six. I had counted them four times already, and I counted them a fifth time, the way a woman straightens a picture that is already straight.

I thought about my father in the pickup with the engine running. I thought, she could be sitting out in the lot right now with the lights off.

And I thought, what have I done to this girl?

Then headlights swung across the high windows.

The first trucks came at a quarter past five, which was early, and I stopped worrying about the cold. They parked in the barn lot and along the shoulder of V-14, and then down the blacktop in both directions, and by a quarter to six the taillights stretched a half mile.

Four hundred and thirty-eight people came, Lorraine said later. She stood by the door all night with a clicker like a woman at a ballgame. They stood in little groups with their paper plates, talking low, like people waiting at a wedding for the bride. The band played soft, the way you play for a room that is waiting.

At five past seven, I was standing at the little window beside the big door when Pat Lindahl’s Buick turned in at the gate.

Nate got out first, in the only coat he had left, a brown canvas work coat with a torn pocket that came out of the church clothing closet. Bree came around with Josie in her arms. Ada got Colt out of the back seat and held his mitten, and the four of them stood in the yard under the pole light with their breath going up.

They looked at the lit windows and the trucks parked as far as they could see in the dark.

“That’s a lot of trucks,” Nate said.

Ada tugged his sleeve. “Daddy, are we going in?”

Bree looked up. She looked right through the little window at me. She didn’t smile and she didn’t frown. She only looked, the way you look at somebody you have suddenly figured out.

I had to step back from the glass.

Walt Vogel was standing at the big door with his shoulder against it. He is seventy-four, and he put the weight of his whole body into it. The wheels shrieked on the rail. Cold air came in around his boots.

The door rolled all the way open, and the band stopped playing.